Trump Rages Viciously at Young Female Journo—and Even Fox Is Cringing

In dense and convoluted remarks, Donald Trump defended that disgusting ad in the Ohio gubernatorial race. The ad from Republican Vivek Ramaswamy featured the mother of Democrat Amy Acton calling her a liar. But it quickly emerged that Acton was apparently raped by her step-father, the mother’s husband. The move backfired spectacularly, as numerous Republicans, including Ohio governor Mike DeWine strongly condemned the ad and GOP panic over the race erupted. Even MAGA appears divided. We talked to Jim Swift, a senior editor at The Bulwark, who wrote a good piece on this fiasco. We discuss the deeper reasons Ramaswamy decided this ad would energize the MAGA base, how it could cost Republicans the Ohio gubernatorial and Senate contests, and what this ugly saga says about the depravity of Late-Stage MAGA and the growing mainstream backlash to it.

Donald Trump just unleashed a panicky string of posts—see here, here, here, and here—in which he frantically urged Republicans to vote by mail early. Amusingly, this comes after he told Republicans for months that mail-balloting is fraudulent to pass his SAVE America Act. Now that his efforts to nix vote-by-mail have flopped, he’s prodding Republicans to adopt it—effectively admitting his attacks on vote-by-mail were a scam to help him rig the election. Mail voting is an essential piece of pre-election-day voting, so his “fraud” nonsense could be discouraging GOP early voting, too. So what does the data say? To find out, we talked to Michael McDonald, who tracks the early vote at the UF Election Lab and on his Substack. He explains why the data suggests Democrats and independents are far more energized than Republicans, what we can extrapolate from it about the election, and how Trump screwed himself on early-vote-by-mail. We also discuss the latest New York Times poll showing Democrats leading by 11 points and Trump at a new low, which suggests the bottom is falling out for him.

With less than two weeks until Election Day, the Michigan Senate race is more or less on a knife’s edge. Amid all this, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has had some hugely viral moments lately, tangling with a MAGA plant over a question about the Muslim Brotherhood and battling with JD Vance over the vice president’s vile attacks on him. We think El-Sayed is developing an interesting way of doing politics that seems attuned to the information wars of the Trump era. Will it work in a swingy state that’s coming down to the wire? We talked to El-Sayed about the state of the race, the affordability crisis, his high-profile viral battles, and how it all reflects his deeper theory of politics in the Trump-MAGA era.

Donald Trump’s approval just sank to an abysmal 33-66 in the new Washington Post poll, a record low in Post polling. The survey also finds Democrats leading in the battle for the House by eight points. Meanwhile, the new NBC poll also finds Trump below 35 percent and puts the Democratic lead at 10 points. The polling averages also suggest a Democratic lead pressing double digits. Small wonder that Republicans are leaking to Politico that they blame this debacle squarely on Trump. One says Trump is clueless about what “voters care about,” adding: “It’s insane.” Others are sharply criticizing Trump’s super PAC operatives, revealing that they’re trying to shift blame onto Republicans and away from Trump himself. That’s deeply embarrassing given Trump’s constant claim that he’s giving Republicans a huge lift. We talked to Madison Andrus of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. She discusses how wide the map is getting, what the role of Trump’s unpopularity is in putting deep red areas in play, and why Democrats are bullish about pulling off a sweep of House districts in South Texas.

In recent days, Donald Trump has exploded over James Talarico’s Senate candidacy in Texas. In a long, tortured tirade, Trump repeatedly called him “James TalaFREAKO” and raged at Karl Rove for supposedly wanting Ken Paxton to lose. He even ordered Fox to stop airing Rove. In another tirade, he fumed that Paxton is the “greatest attorney general” in Texas’s history and angrily wondered why Talarico hasn’t been defeated already. Meanwhile, in a striking exchange, a Fox anchor and a GOP Congressman appeared rattled as they wondered aloud why Texans appear prepared to vote for Talarico despite him obviously being a woke leftist whackjob. Translation: Why, oh why, aren’t MAGA-GOP smears working? We talked to Texas-based Democratic strategist Nancy Zdunkewicz. She explains the deeper reasons why attacks on Talarico aren’t sticking, walks through the state of play in the race’s final days, and grapples with whether the tightening polls amid the GOP’s avalanche of home-stretch spending should worry Democrats.